The 30-year gilt yield touched 6.02% during trading on 7 October, having first crossed 6% on 1 October, a level last seen in 199812. Gilts are the bonds the government sells to borrow, and the yield is the annual return lenders demand to hold them. The 10-year yield closed at 5.38% on 6 October and the 30-year at 5.90%.
Buyers kept bidding through the rise. The Debt Management Office (DMO), the Treasury agency that sells gilts, priced £4.25bn of its 5⅜% 2056 gilt on 8 September to yield 5.8168%, raising about £4.0bn in cash3. UK investors took about 71%. That completed the sale whose banks the DMO named in August.
Every September auction sold. The weakest drew £3.07 of bids for each £1 on offer, on £4.75bn of a 2032 gilt on 22 September4, below August's 3.34 to 3.65 range and the 3.58 times of early September. At all four sales, on 10, 15 and 22 September, bids were worth more than three times the amount on offer.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said on 1 October that about two-thirds of the 10-year's third-quarter climb reflects the expected path of Bank Rate, the policy rate the Bank of England sets5. The other third is a larger term premium, the extra return lenders want for tying money up longer, now 0.83 percentage points. French and Italian premia run about three times Britain's, by NIESR's reckoning. On that split, much of the rise would unwind if inflation figures softened, with no change in fiscal policy.
INSEE, France's statistics office, put French gross debt at 119.0% of GDP at the close of the second quarter of 20266; the April outlook from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put Britain's at 102.3% for calendar 2025. France's ten-year borrowing cost was still about 0.7 percentage points below Britain's on 6 October, on daily data from the aggregators fxmacrodata and ideal-investisseur.fr7. On these different measures Britain owes less and pays more, which fits NIESR's reading that lenders are pricing interest rates, not a British default.
